All art is the creation of forms expressive of human feeling, from the
primitive sense of vitality that goes with breathing and moving one’s
limbs, or even suddenly resting, to the poignant emotions of love and
grief and ecstasy. The essential unity of the arts is vouched for by
this large and single purpose, and really requires no other explanation.
What is difficult to understand is the selective character of artistic
talent. Few creative artists are equally gifted in even two realms of
art. Leonardo, for all his versatility, was above all a painter; his
poetry, from any other pen than the great painter’s, would hardly have
stood the test of five hundred years. Wagner would certainly not have
impressed his generation as poet or dramatist without his musical fame.
William Blake, equally great as poet and painter, always comes to mind
in this connection just because he is a notable exception to the rule.
Talent is normally restricted to one artistic domain. No matter how
positively we proclaim the identity of all arts, in practice we do not
turn to Picasso for musical education, nor expect to learn painting from
Kreisler, nor study ballet under T. S. Eliot. And that is not because
the techniques are too specialized for one man to master; painting is
technically as different from sculpture as it is from piano playing; but
it is near to sculpture and far from piano playing, because the primary
illusion it creates is virtual space, and what music creates is
something else. Music is of a different order of imagination, and even
if it were made with hammer and chisel on a stone that emitted sounds,
it would be music, not sculpture.

The function of plastic art—”to make space visible, and its continuity
sensible,” as Hildebrand stated it—has been generally overlooked,
because a much less important but more obvious function commanded
people’s first interest: imitation of things that are visible in
actuality (which space is not). Music, too, is theoretically
misunderstood because an obvious approach to it presents itself at once,
and blocks our view of what a musician really creates. The wrong
premises here are not as naive as the copy-theory of visual art, but
they lead, I think, to an equally unenlightening analysis. They are, in
brief, that the elements of music are tones, whose essential characters
are pitch, duration, loudness, and timbre (tone-color depending on
overtones); that these tones are combined by the composer to yield
patterns of sound, characterized as melody, harmony, and rhythm.
Complex patterns, exempli-fying all these characters, are works of
music, which act upon our sensibilities, and stimulate our emotions. To
“understand” a piece of music is to recognize its factors, which are, of
course, more subtle than this bare outline indicates, but belong in the
general categories here named.

What, then, is created in music? Apparently nothing; tones are
produced, but tones are actual phenomena, and their somatic effects are
actual, like the effects of contact with warm or cold objects, the smell
of perfume, etc. According to this view, musical composition should be
a science rather than an art. That theory has, indeed, been seriously
entertained.

Yet music is the most enthralling, i.e. illusionistic, phenomenon in the
world. What we hear in listening to sounds “musically” is not their
specific pitch and loudness, duration and timbre. Often we are not even
specifically aware of melody, harmony, or rhythmic figure, yet the music
is perfectly meaningful. What we hear is what Hanslick has properly
described as “tönend bewegte Formen”—“sounding forms in motion.”
We hear movement and rest, swift movement or slow, stop, attack,
direction, parallel and contrary motion, melody rising or soaring or
sinking, harmonies crowding or resolving or clashing; moving forms in
continuous flux.

But in all this progressive motion there is actually nothing that
moves. Here a word may be in order to forestall a popular fallacy:
namely, that the motion is actual because strings or air-columns and the
air around them move. But such motion is not what we perceive.
Vibration is minute, very fast, and without direction—or rather, it s
direction is back and forth, in an infinitesimal space. The motion of
tonal forms, however, is large and directed toward some point of
relative rest. In a simple passage like the following:

the three
eighth notes progress up to the tonic C. But in actuality there
is no thing that moves up. The C is their point of rest; yet physically
there is faster motion during the time we hear the C than there was
while we heard the three tones going up to it. The motion of sounding
forms, like the forms themselves—everything, in fact, but the
sounding—is sheer appearance, illusion. The forms are virtual, their
motion is virtual, and the whole composition is a semblance.

Music is a semblance of Time in its passage. What it creates is an
order of virtual time, defined and organized by the illusion of motion.
Music makes time audible, and its continuity sensible. It does this by
virtue of its basic abstraction, sounding forms in motion, or kinetic
tonal forms.

Just as the space of experience is not the space of geometry, so
experienced time is not the time we establish by clocks. Our actual
subjective time-perception is even more composite, pragmatic, and
incomplete than our space-perception. Clock time is a highly simplified
abstraction from experienced time; scientific time is a refinement of
clock time. Both share one basic formal property that results from the
intellectual economy they serve—they are both conceived as having but
one dimension. Modern scientific time, in fact, is one dimension
of a greater relational construction.

All this is very far from time as we know it in direct experience, where
it has many characteristics. Experiential time is essentially
passage, or the feeling of transience. That is, I believe, what
Bergson meant by “duration,” as opposed to scientific time which he
regarded as “spatialized” and thereby falsified, because space seemed to
him less real than time. Why space should be less real is hard to
understand, but his doctrine has a true intent none the less: for
“spatialized” time is time conceived through a metaphor from
space experience, and the time-concept thus attained is “clock time” in
the broadest sense, culminating in the useful but artificial
construction we call “scientific time.” It is not based on the feeling
of passage, but on the comparison of physical states and the
observation of differences between them. States are ranged in an order
of before and after; the contrasts they present are the measure of
change. What lies between two states is not observed, but left
vague, because its exact conception is unnecessary to the formalization
of a measurable time. Just because actual passage is not conceived,
“clock time” is homogeneous and simple and may be treated as
one-dimensional.

Experiential time, on the other hand, is not simple at all. Besides the
property we commonly call “length,” and treat as its one dimension, it
has another that I can only denote, metaphorically, as volume.
Subjectively, a unit of time may be great or small as well as long or
short. The slang phrase “a big time” is psychologically more accurate
than “a pleasant time” or “a quickly-passed time.” It is this
voluminousness of the direct experience of passage that makes it, as
Bergson says, indivisible. But even its volume is not simple; for it is
filled with its own characteristic forms, as space is filled with
material forms; and each order is really conceivable only because it is
divided by the things in it, whereby it may be noted and measured. The
forms that fill time are tensions—physical emotional or
intellectual. Time exists for us because we experience tensions and
their resolutions. Their peculiar building-up, and their ways of
breaking or diminishing or merging into longer and greater tensions,
make for a vast variety of temporal forms. If we could undergo only
single, successive organic strains, perhaps subjective time would be
one-dimensional, like the scientific time ticked off by clocks. But
life is always a dense fabric of concurrent tensions, and as each of
them is a measure of time, the measurements themselves do not coincide.
This causes our time-experience to fall apart into incommensurate
elements which cannot all be perceived together as clear forms. If one
is taken as parameter others become “irrational,” out of focus,
ineffable. Some tensions therefore, always sink into the background;
some drive and some drag, but for perception they give quality
rather than form to the passage of time, which unfolds in the pattern of
the dominant and distinct strain whereby we are measuring it.

Subjective time is perceived in actual life only in a haphazard and
confused way. For practical purposes we largely ignore it and let the
formal measurements of the clock predominate, because they are designed
pragmatically in the universal framework of astronomical events, so that
we can all agree on them. Like actual space, which we measure in
geometric abstraction or else accept vaguely as a mixture of views,
things, and places, so actual time is either a scientific datum or a
confused experience of physical and mental strains—of waiting,
expectation, fulfillment, surprise. It has no unified perceptual form,
no clear continuity.

The creation of a self-contained temporal order, continuous,
all-inclusive, and entirely given in direct experience, is the business
of music. The elements of music therefore are sensuous images of the
tensions and resolutions which constitute passage for us; and
those sensuous images, creating the semblance of passage, are tonal
forms in virtual motion. By these the illusion of time is achieved and
its experiential character set forth—its complexity, density, and
volume, its interwoven elements and indivisible flow.

If, now, we turn to the standard analysis of music and are confronted
again by the inventory of its constituents—tones having definite degrees
of duration and pitch, by virtue of which they may be composed into
rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic patterns, enhanced by variations of
loudness and timbre—we see that this study begins with musical
materials, not musical elements. But it lacks an adequate principle for
admitting or excluding materials. The sounds of a snaredrum, which have
neither definite pitch nor controllable duration, cannot really be
classed as “tones” at all. Rhythm, supposedly their main contribution,
is achieved by leaving exact intervals between them, i.e. by
silences. Is silence to be a constituent? Moreover, there is music
that loses much of its character when it is separated from words; but
words, though they are sounds, make “musical” patterns only in a
derivative sense, for they are not tones. Is such music a hybrid art?

Materials are actual, and their properties are fixed. Elements, on the
other hand, are virtual, for they are constituents of the total
semblance. The question of what is or is not a musical element is
easily answered with reference to the primary illusion: anything is a
musical element that enters into the illusion—that serves to create,
support, and organize the virtual image of time. The materials of which
musical elements are made may be tones or atonal sounds, silence,
speech, even dramatic actions motivating changes of theme. There is no
legislating as to what shall be material for music. Once the primary
illusion has been experienced, there are many materials, and probably
many primitive sources of the art it begets. The musical mind finds
music everywhere—in speech, in nature, in the rhythms of work; and so it
uses everything resonant, from the human voice to the bowstring and the
hollow drum, to make the passage of time audible and its forms
expressive.

There are certain kindred arts, that create the same primary illusion in
different modes. The subject is too extensive to be introduced here,
except to remark that—plausibly enough—sculpture and architecture stand
in this relation to painting, and drama to literature. Music, also, is
generally supposed to have a sister art, namely the dance. They have
grown up together; and after many centuries in which music rose to the
highest artistic levels and ballet sank to mere entertainment or
ballroom exercise, our so-called “modern dance” is again a serious
creative venture, and is generally regarded as a musical art. Some
aestheticians, and even more significantly—some excellent dancers and
choreographers, and a few musicians, maintain that exactly the same
forms may be exhibited in tone as in bodily motion, so that the
difference between music and dance is only a superficial one of appeal
to hearing or to vision, as the case may be, like the difference between
spoken and written language. The French music critic who calls himself
Jean D’Udine says in his provocative little book, L’art et le geste:
“All music is dance—all melody just a series of attitudes, poses.”
Jacques-Dalcroze, who was a musician and not a dancer by training,
regarded dance as a direct translation of music into bodily responses,
so that any music could be “danced,” i.e., rendered precisely as a
balletic pattern. Fokine undertakes to translate Beethoven’s symphonies
into choreographic terms. And Sakharov writes in his Reflections on
Music and the Dance: “I do not dance to music, I dance
music.” The person who taught him to do this, he claims, was Isadora
Duncan; she was the first serious artist who proposed to dance music
itself, to interpret it, just as a virtuoso with his instrument
interprets what the composer has written.

Isadora’s relation to music, however, is just what throws a serious
doubt on the musical character of dance. An artist is usually
incompetent judge of work in his entire realm, i.e., anywhere within the
scope of the primary illusion of his art, even where that illusion
appears in a special mode not his own. But dancers are not usually
connoisseurs of music, and there are but few musicians who appreciate
dancing at all. Isadora’s musical taste was simply mystifying. From
the musician’s standpoint it was neither good nor bad, but
unpredictable. She admired very good pieces and very bad ones; her
favorite composers were Beethoven and Ethelbert Nevin. What she did
with their works was always beautiful, but musical critics generally
protested that she did not understand the music and flouted the
composer’s intent.

The explanation is, I think, that her judgment was not musical, but
balletic; and that very great and very poor music, alike, may have
balletic value. Isadora’s feeling was so entirely for dance that she
could find nothing else in music, and therefore believed that what she
danced was the music itself, its very essence. This belief did not
interfere with her art, but it did mislead and affront musical people,
whose conceptions of Beethoven certainly were not reflected, let alone
deepened, by her performance. Musicians generally resent the modern
ballet just because they believe it to be a musical art, and then find
that it adds nothing to music, but on the contrary distorts and abuses
it.

The illusion created in dance—any kind of dance, from square dance or
social dance to the Russian ballet—is neither that of music, i.e.
virtual time, nor the virtual space of plastic art. Dance is a separate
art, with its own primary illusion.

What, then, is dance? Those dancers who do not regard it as a
representation of music generally define it as a spatial art, and
conceive it either as a pattern of motions with moments of statuesque
arrest, or else as a succession of poses, like tableaux vivants,
connected by motions. This is the “classic” point of view, comparable
to the conception of painting as arrangement of colors, and of music as
the combination of consonant or dissonant tones. For in the dance,
motion is actual, not illusory, and a pattern of motions taken simply as
such is aesthetic rather than significant. There is another school,
however, sometimes frowned upon as “impure” in its aim, that treats all
balletic motion as pantomime, i.e., formalized imitation of acts. The
histrionic content here is of course thematic, and if it monopolizes or
even distracts the beholder’s interest it debases the dance. Imitation,
however important to a particular piece, is never an essential factor in
an art. Yet the dramatic theory has its virtues, for it presents
balletic motion as gesture. This immediately sets dance apart
from mobile sculpture, from the rhythmic movements of machines, the
sinuous grace of a hunting cat, or the weaving of gnats in the air.
Gesture is in some ways a broader term than motion, and in other ways
narrower: broader, because a pose, a look, a moment of rigor may be a
gesture without being a motion; narrower, because not all motions are
gestures. Gesture is expressive behavior. In actual life it is often
unconscious, symptomatic of emotions and impulses; an attitude of
weariness, for instance, is a sustained unconscious gesture. But
gesture may be deliberate, too, and practical (pointing, beckoning,
warning, etc.), or even symbolic, supplementing language (as when one
says: “A fish as big as that”). The deaf-mute alphabet is a
completely discursive system of gesture; another, less articulate but
more self-evident, is the sign language evolved by Indian and white
scouts, in which the principle of symbolization is pantomime, stretched
to great lengths of meta-phorical use.

Gesticulation, however, is not art; it is expression, subjective
self-expression or objective logical expression as the case may be, but
as long as it is essentially either emotive or practical it is not art.
If gestures could convey nothing but literal ideas—“I throw a ball,”
“the swan dies,” “this is the way we wash the clothes”—they would not
lend themselves to artistic uses. But they are more than involuntary or
semantic acts: they are forms of behavior. As forms they may be
abstracted, and treated freely to create rhythms, indivisible lines of
action, the appearance of challenge and response, the illusion of powers
in conflict, in balance, or in union. And here we have the ruling
principle—the primary illusion of balletic art: all dance creates a
realm of virtual Power, an illusory field of forces involved only
with each other, weaving a fabric of freely rhythmic, continuous and
coherent gesture.

The forces presented in dance may be physical, psychical, mythic or
magical, but they are always felt, not computed or inferred. They are
not the actual forces that move the dancers, bodily energies limited by
gravity and friction, but lures and excitements, prescribed paths,
engulfing rhythms, personal wills—all orgiastic, mystical, or musical
causes, virtual powers that evoke virtual activities. In watching a
ballet one is not aware of people running around, but of the dance
driving this way, drawn that way, gathering here,
spreading there. In a pas-de-deux the two partners seem to
magnetize each other. The relation between them is more than a spatial
one; it is a relation of forces.

The most elementary means of abstracting motion from the work it
actually performs is rhythm. This is a psychological factor, not an
intrinsic property of mechanical motions, where there is uniformity, but
no accent. We organize uniformities mentally into arsis and thesis, to
and fro, tick and tock. Rhythmization transforms walking into marching,
prancing into dancing; for it establishes a conceptual control over
motion and gives it a clearly sensible form. As soon as we feel the
rhythm of a march, it dominates our walking; we “fall into step.”
Ballroom dancing is one of the simplest abstractions of motion from the
purpose of locomotion, which becomes subordinate. Through
rhythm, and the gestive form of the step, the partners are oriented
toward each other, and this virtual relation links them even without any
physical contact. Artistically such performance has very limited
possibilities, yet it creates its own little realm of virtual power, and
is genuine dance.

In higher phases of balletic art, real activities are often simulated,
and enter into the pattern of gestures as pantomime, or dance-motifs.
But in so doing they are always transmuted into mere appearances: in
representing flight from a pursuer, the dancers do not actually run as
they would at an alarm of fire, but retreat in a rippling toe-dance or
even pirouetting, or withdraw with a mere leaning gesture—anything, in
fact, except turning around and running. If the dance is successful,
they seem to be driven by a menacing force and to be carried by emotion.

If we regard dance as the envisagement of a realm of Powers and the
presentation of their interplay, we can readily understand why dance
holds a supreme position in primitive culture, why it is universally
linked with religion, and why it usually reaches its highest development
before music is more than a rhythmic accompaniment to it, and before
painting has risen above traditional designs on pottery and textiles or
on the human body. Elaborate ritual dances are found where poetry does
not yet seem to exist. The reason is that imaginary Powers—mana, taboo,
magic, godhead and doom—are the realities of primitive life, but not the
prosaic realities: they constitute a closed and sanctified realm, the
spirit-world.1 The center of this
world—the altar—is the natural focus of the dance, which symbolizes and
celebrates such Powers. The altar is the virtual force that organizes
the whole field, and around it or its equivalent—the idol, the priest,
the totem—the dance develops. Pantomime usually supplies the motifs, as
physical objects furnish motifs for painting and sculpture. The magic
circle governed by the god is the ideal choric stage, and ritual a
constant source of purely expressive actions, thematic elements that
weave themselves naturally into dance.

The proposition that artistic symbols are non-discursive forms,
presenting the morphology of sentience which discursive forms cannot
express, meets its test case, of course, in the literary arts.
Certainly literature is composed of discursive symbols; and just as
certainly it contains more than a logically adequate statement of
propositions. This is most evident in poetry. Many books have been
written on the problem of poetic quality, and different thinkers have
attributed it variously to word-music, to imagery, to suggested
associations, and to value-judgments implied by the poet’s selection of
things to dwell upon. Dream symbolism especially has been held
responsible for poetic appeal.

Word-music is a factor in poetic composition, but it is not what makes
poetry. The same is true of imagery, word-pathos, “criticism of life,”
and dynamic” phantasy. Sound and sense, implication and suggestion,
derivations and metaphorical meanings, grammar, accent, dialect, strong
and weak word-forms—all are materials out of which the elements of
poetry may be made. But those elements are as non-discursive as
the painter’s perceptual objects, the musician’s sonorous moving forms,
the dancer’s virtual forces. They are created, i.e., are illusions
achieved by abstracting semblances from the actual world, and then
composing these sheer appearances into new forms that mirror the logic
of feeling.

The nature of literary creations is most readily illustrated in a simple
experience with words that probably everyone has encountered: that a
perfectly familiar fact seems perfectly terrible when stated a certain
way. I do not mean in a certain tone of voice, but with a particular
turn of phrase. Surely everybody has at some time been told: “It sounds
so awful when you put it like that!” Or: “When you say it that way, it
seems silly.” Or: “He made it sound simply wonderful.” One does not
protest that the fact is so awful because of the presentation, but only
that it seems, or “sounds,” that way. But one might say quite truly:
“When you put it like that, it’s an awful thought!” The thought is
awful, although the proposition remains just what it was. And here, I
believe, is the principle of all literature, which is most evident in
lyric poetry. Poetry asserts propositions only as thoughts. The same
proposition may be thought in countless ways, and each way has its own
emotional value. The proposition, which might be expressed in logical
symbols, is related to the thought as a physical object is related to a
visual form that portrays it. The thought is what the poet’s way of
stating the proposition creates; the thought is a poetic element.

Our actual thoughts chase each other in haphazard fashion, so that their
complete form rarely develops. We think and act without taking stock of
the way events and phantasies, beliefs and proposals and expectations
really present themselves; yet such experiences constitute our personal
history. Like all actuality, that history is only half perceived, and
half intellectually constructed. For practical purposes we do not need
to remember an unbroken past, but only to reconstruct salient moments,
that mark successive stations in the progression of events known as our
“life.”

Literary art, by contrast, creates a completely “lived” piece of
experience. The piece may be very small, like the brief thought that
constitutes a lyric such as:

A slight disorder in the dress

Giveth to youth a wantonness—

But it is a
thought really seen in its passage, followed through from its whimsical
rise to the final pronouncement of taste that closes it. The idea is
fully entertained, without being foiled by the incursion of other,
perhaps more important thoughts; and it seems to be entertained
actively, at the moment, though it was written more than 300 years ago.
The reason is that it is the semblance of a thought; that is why we
read it as something essentially timeless. The present tense,
which is characteristic of lyric poetry, is really a “historical
present,” for it makes no reference to the actual situation of the poet,
but to an envisaged piece of life. In that context, events and acts
seemingly take place as they do in actuality—but only seemingly; the
experience of them is virtual, and the form of the illusory occurrences
is as much simplified, organized, and composed as a picture. But such
illusory events are not discursive propositions. The propositional
material has been transformed into experiential elements in a created
semblance of life.

This total semblance is, I think, what critics often refer to as the
poet’s “vision.” I can find no other justification for that word. In
the framework of the present theory, however, it is perfectly justified.
A poem is essentially and entirely a creation; the words beget virtual
elements, that exhibit forms of sensibility and emotion and thus carry a
meaning beyond the discursive statements involved in their construction.
But the meaning is not something to be read “between the lines”; it is
in thelines, in every word and every punctuation mark as
well as in the literal content of every sentence. The whole fabric is a
work of art.

The first task that confronts an artist is always to establish the
primary illusion, i.e., to close the total form and set it apart from
actuality. That is the purpose of poetic structure—of meter, rhyme,
divisions, repeated or imitated lines, and pure sound-effects like hey-nonny-no
and daffy-down-dilly. How much of this artifice is needed depends on
what other elements there are that will assure the “psychical distance”
of the work. A heavy discursive content usually requires a strict
poetic form, as for instance the sonnet; there is such a thing as a true
sonnet idea, which calls for every device of fabrication, from
word-music to interlacing rhymes, to keep the thought in the realm of
imagination. If, on the other hand, great imagery and a certain
unrealism of subject matter already perform this function, the poetic
structure may be very free, as in the Psalms of David. In poetry as
elsewhere, the means of creating virtual elements are various, and
almost every one—sound allusion, imagery, archaism, dynamic sym-bolism,
ambiguity, etc.—has its possible alternatives.

The most prevalent single device, probably the first to beget literature
at all, is narrative. The image of experience is most readily obtained
as we obtain it in actual life, namely as memory. Marcel Proust finds
this to be, indeed, his only key to authentic composition, for memory
leaves much out but intensifies what it retains, and usually completes
its reconstructions of life by the principle of association rather than
real causal connectedness. The process of intensification seems to him
the essence of all poetic experience, and certainly there is much to be
said for his analysis. Memory is formative, and produces perspectives
of deeply felt events. In literature the unfolding of a story does the
same thing. Even a simple narrative is such an organizing force that we
usually speak of it as the “plot,” i.e., the ground plan, of the work in
which it is utilized. Where the principle of narration enters into
poetic structure all other devices have to adjust themselves: the choice
of imagery is no longer free, as in the pure lyric, but is determined by
the need of heightening some events and perhaps preparing others, and of
slowing or hurrying the course of action. The descriptions of
witch-fires and water snakes and “slimy things” in the Ancient
Mariner make the story move with terrifying slowness while the ship
is in doldrums. The same effect may ruin a work, where the story ought
to move and is delayed by long descriptions introduced for their own
sake, as in many romantic poems and novels. The verbal problem, on the
other hand, becomes much simpler where narration holds the total
structure together; the intensive poetic cadence that is the magic of
the lyric is no longer needed, so a much simpler form, e.g., the
colloquial language and regular meter of the ballad, may take its place.
The prime virtue of story is that it constructs a much bigger span of
experience than a presentation of entirely subjective events can effect.
It creates in free and full scope the primary illusion of literature,
which is a virtual Past.

As the lyric and the ode use the present tense to convey thoughts that
are really timeless, so the ballad is normally in the past tense,
because it achieves the illusion of history. The perfect tense is, in
fact, characteristic of literature as a whole; the use of the present is
a special device, for the semblance of experience made with words is
always complete, like memory. But it is a powerful device, the
historical present, and does not by any means always achieve
“timelessness”; it may intensify a past event, as strong feeling
intensifies memories to the point of making them almost eidetic, so
people sometimes say: “It’s just as though it were now!”

The ballad is built on one straightforward story, and has therefore a
fundamentally linear structure, reflected in its simple and fast-moving
meter. There are broader planes that give one a sense of
contemporaneousness of events, and consequently of history as a fabric
rather than a sequence of actions. Such a design is the romance, which
uses a new technique, namely a detailed account of how things are
done instead of the mere statement of their occurrence. Here
description serves for something more than to delight the imagination by
dwelling on events; this being dwelled on gives the events new form—like
the creation of visual forms suddenly in three dimensions instead of
two. That, far more than the introduction of occasional contemporaneous
happenings, gives the romance the appearance of a fabric instead of a
thread of history. The descriptive principle, in fact, is so effectual
that the persons in the story may be quite schematically rendered, human
types rather than individuals, actors in a very colorful scene, like
figures in a tapestry.

As the resources of narrative are developed, the office of pure diction,
i.e., poetic statement, becomes less vital; the romance retains its
literary virtue even in prose, as in the Spanish “novella.” Finally the
full-fledged novel, the chief fictional work of our age, presents an
entirely different appearance, for its most important creations are
“characters,” individual human agents. These are so obviously its
pivotal elements that popular judgment, and often even the professional
critics, treat only the personalities in a novel as the author’s
creations, and literary criticism is led into a new danger, namely that
of regarding the novelist as essentially a psychologist, a reporter on
typical human reactions. Any novel that presents a lifelike personality
is likely to be hailed as great literature. The peripheral characters,
the places, the impersonal events, all these are passed over. But in
fact they are all cut out of the same cloth as the central personages.
Not only the brothers Karamazov, but the dim figures of the Elder the
lame little girl, the inn-keeper and the officers of the law are
literary creations; if they are undeveloped it is not because Dostoevsky
did not know their prototypes intimately enough to give them more
articulate form, but because he because he really created, not copied,
them—created their outlines as he needed them, without detail but with
perfect truth. Furthermore, the inn, the garden, the days and nights
are all creations—elements in a virtual Past which bears the stamp of
vivid memory, yet is not anyone’s actual recollection.

The analysis of forms I have just presented leads from the simplest—the
use of words to abstract the appearance and feeling of propositions as
they figure in our thinking—to the very elaborate composition of virtual
events filling a whole human consciousness, even an extended, imaginary
“social consciousness.” Historically, however, the very complex was
first; for all literary devices—rhythmic cadence, story, imagery,
realism and supernaturalism and mythical symbolism, dramatic characters,
lyric utterance, dialogue—all may be found in the epic, which is the
cradle of literature.

All—yes; but not all at once. The epic is the matrix, for in its
great structure there is a constant variety of forms due to the
alternating use of techniques each of which produces its own
perspective. The purer literary genders have been derived, I believe,
by specialization, through the discovery that any principle may become
central, and may, in fact, stand proxy for any other, given the
circumstances. It is this possibility of alternating the techniques of
creation that keeps the several forms (lyric, ballad, novel, biography,
etc.) so closely related; but it also begets their multiplicity, which
is presumably not exhausted yet.

Nothing has been said, so far, about that ancient and eminent art form,
the drama; and in the compass of this essay little can be said, save
that I believe the drama is not strictly literature at all. It
has a different origin, and uses words only as utterances. It is
a kindred art, for it produces the same primary illusion as literature,
namely the semblance of experienced events, but in a different mode:
instead of creating a virtual Past it creates a virtual Present. It is
related to literature as sculpture and architecture are related to the
graphic arts. But this categorical statement must remain an “aside”;
our subject is already too great for the allotted pages.

In the scaffolding of this theory of art, which was derived by
generalization from the more limited study of significant forms in
music, the first result is a very radical setting apart of the major
arts. Yet oddly enough, as soon as they are duly distinguished, their
basic identity comes to light, because their respective principles,
whereby each is an autonomous realm, are analogous, so their abstract
formulations coincide, and make one set of propositions expressing the
broad and universal principles of Art. But, to borrow Rudyard Kipling’s
phrase, “That is another story.”

1
The dichotomy of primitive life into sacred and profane was noted and
developed by Cassirer in Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen,
vol. 2. See also Language and Myth and An Essay on Man.